Artículos

MICCA partnered with CARE International in the Hillside Conservation Agriculture Project (HICAP) in the Uluguru Mountains in eastern Tanzania and with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation within agricultural development activities with smallholder farmers between 2011 and 2014. The article presents results of the work held by the programme in Tanzania.

Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted extensively to increase the productivity and environmental sustainability of maize production systems across sub-Saharan Africa and is often listed as a climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practice. However, the impacts of CA on food security, resilience/adaptive capacity and climate change mitigation are location-dependent and it is unknown whether CA can simultaneously address CSA’s multiple objectives.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Fao) recently revised information on trends in global Ghg emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (Afolu), and was the first to release global Afolu emissions data for 2012. According to Fao, the share of Afolu emissions to the anthropogenic total has declined over the 1990-2012 period. While agriculture emissions continue to increase annually, they are not growing as fast as emissions from fossil fuel use in other sectors.

Using newly available data from the 2015 Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), we refined the information, currently available through the IPCC AR5 and FAOSTAT, on recent trends in global and regional net CO2 emissions and removals from forest land, including from net forest conversion (used as a proxy for deforestation) and forest remaining forest. The new analysis is based on the simplified forest carbon stock method of the FAOSTAT Emissions database, equivalent to a Tier 1, Approach 1 IPCC methodology, limited to biomass carbon stocks.

We refine the information available through the IPCC AR5 with regard to recent trends in global GHG emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU), including global emission updates to 2012. Using all three available AFOLU datasets employed for analysis in the IPCC AR5, rather than just one as done in the IPCC AR5 WGIII Summary for Policy Makers, our analyses point to a down-revision of global AFOLU shares of total anthropogenic emissions, while providing important additional information on subsectoral trends. Our findings confirm that the share of AFOLU emissions to the anthropogenic total declined over time. They indicate a decadal average of 28.7 ± 1.5% in the 1990s and 23.6 ± 2.1% in the 2000s and an annual value of 21.2 ± 1.5% in 2010.